Michael Lund walked out of his office at the Borden Light Marina and looked out at a field of sparkling water.

It was not an entirely welcome sight.

On yet another cold Friday in April, about one in 10 of Lund’s slips were filled. Those were occupied by big boats that tucked into a safe harbor for the winter and would head out to Newport, Martha’s Vineyard and Boston when the weather broke.

Behind him, his parking lot was filled with 35-foot Catalina sloops or 40-foot Carver power cruisers. All of them still wrapped in plastic and balanced on boat stands.

“We put our first boat in for the year today,” Lund said on April 4. “Normally, we have a lot more in by now.

“It has been cold and there has been a lot more wind than usual. It is 20 degrees colder here on a windy day than it is downtown. No one wants to come out and work on their boats.”

And so it goes for marinas. As the weather improves, their days get worse. From now until the Fourth of July, boat yards will be working overtime to get pleasure craft into the water. Every cold day in April will make June that much worse, they say.

This year has not been kind.

“Everything we do depends on the weather this time of year,” said Tom Ransley of Shaw’s Boat Yard, 86 Main St., in Dighton. “The weather this year hasn’t been helpful.

“And, of course, the economy has been tough, too. We’ll have to see what kind of year we have.”

Marina operators are a lot like farmers. No matter what they do, no matter how much they prepare or plan, their fate hinges on both the weather and the economy. If either is bad, it makes for a bad year.

In this area, with a natural resource like Mount Hope Bay, and the Taunton and Sakonnet rivers, marinas dot the landscape and provide hundreds of jobs. What happens to them effects the economy of the region.

Lately, despite some good summers, the economy has beaten the industry. Boats have been abandoned in the yards. Every boatyard has cut abandoned project boats into pieces that will fit into a dumpster.

Everyone is hoping for that to change.

It hasn’t, yet.

“It is still a little slow here,” said a worker at Somerset Marina and Yacht Sales, 3828 Riverside Ave., in Somerset. “People are still hibernating, waiting for a warm day.”

Kara O’Connell, the fourth generation of her family to work at Captain O’Connell, 180 River St., spent a cold, rainy Thursday in early April operating machinery to launch the yard’s first boat, a 42-foot Silverton yacht. Another 200 boats were still on stands.

Page 2 of 2 - It is a late start for the season, she said. She knows. The whole yard knows.

“My grandparents, Joseph and Miriam O’Connell, started the yard in 1925,” she said. “In one building, we won’t paint the wall because it was where my grandmother wrote her accounts. She kept track of who belonged to what boat and when they went in and what they owed.

“This is a slow start.”

But a few good weekends could change that. When the rain stops and the temperature promises to stay above 50 degrees, boat owners will come down to scrape and sand boat bottoms and apply a coat of anti-fouling paint. They will polish their props, change zincs, flush fresh water tanks, struggle with hoses and fuel and mold left over from the year before and rediscover the dozen small problems they forgot about as soon as the boat was covered last fall.

“We try to stay ahead of the work,” Lund said. “But what happens, a lot of boat owners plan to do the work themselves. Then they run out of time, especially if it rains on the weekend, so they’ll call us.

“The more cold and bad weather we get right now, the worse it will be in June.